Activists question RTE clause on disabled

The provision was added to the Act on the recommendation of a Parliamentary Standing Committee.

Terming it a regressive move,tantamount to condemning a disabled child to home confinement,activists have written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh,UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal.

They want the clause to be deleted,saying it would otherwise cause disabled children to be marginalised,neglected,isolated,stigmatised and labelled.

It is a cause of celebration that a historic Bill has been piloted by the HRD Ministry8230; But the idea of keeping an option of home schooling for severely disabled children amounts to condemning a child to imprisonment at home, said Dr Mithu Alur,the founder chairperson of the Spastic Society of India.

According to Alur,the Act would make it easier for schools to deny admission to a disabled child and recommend home-based schooling. Given the thin line between various disabilities,even those suffering from mild symptoms may pay the price,Alur fears.

Schools are already known to turn down admission requests for disabled children citing lack of trained teachers.

You would have the likes of physicist Stephen Hawking and Malini Chib refused education in mainstream schools, Alur added.

Poonam Natarajan,the chairperson of the National Trust for Welfare of Persons with Autism,Cerebral Palsy,Mental Retardation and Multiple Disabilities,said they were taking the matter to the highest levels of government.

The law should instead specify that severely disabled children may receive home-based schooling for say one-two years and then they must be sent to mainstream schools, Natarajan said.

Activist Ruma Banerjee,who has worked extensively with disabled children in Karnataka through her NGO Seva-in-action,says her experience has shown that schools find a way of keeping the disabled children out with this provision in the Act.

We have worked closely with the governments Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan,which introduced the home-schooling element,and have observed in Karnataka that because of this many disabled children who can actually be drawn into mainstream schools are not sent to school. Where schools can avoid admitting disabled children,they do so, she said.

She gives the interesting example of Himachal Pradesh as a contrast,where the SSA programme encourages home-schooling volunteers to bring disabled kids to schools and assist them there.

Radhika Alkazi,founder director of the NGO Aarth-Astha,fears that with this clause,the child who needs the most,we are giving the least. This is a non-formal method of education. So why are we reserving it for this one child with disabilities? What provisions are there at home for such children?8230; Most importantly,what kind of social environment are we giving such a child who will have no peers,friends or interaction with a social set-up?

According to G Syamala,executive director of the Action for Ability Development and Inclusion,The challenge is for the state governments and schools to provide mechanisms to ensure mainstream education for children with all disabilities,even if severe.

Meenakshi Balasubramaniam of the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People calls the step a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,to which India is a signatory. Our experience has shown that children with disability who went to school have been integrated far better than those who never went to school.